#the ‘born that way’ talk minimizes that suppressing your differences and conforming is an option

[rotationalsymmetry]

I had some thoughts about gender as I was trying to fall asleep last night. (And I did the responsible thing and prioritized sleep over posting, and I still want to post now even though it is later and my brain rarely holds on to motivation for this sort of thing longer than whenever the next distraction is. Miracles sometimes happen.)

So, nail polish. I like nail polish. But I started getting into nail polish as an adult, and there’s sort of a social expectation that when you’re a kid or maybe a college student, nail polish can just be about fun and personal enjoyment, but by the time you start holding down jobs nail polish should look “professional” or be absent. Relatively subtle (boring) colors, no chips, etc.

Anyways, as somebody new to nail polish (and tbf, most of the time someone who wasn’t “employed”), my nails often didn’t actually look very good, and I was more interested in having fun and experimenting and doing artsy things than in it looking, well, polished. Still am. I got dark blue nails with holo topcoat right now. Topcoat that got smudged a lot while it was drying.

Early on I decided I was going for “interesting” rather than “perfect”, and that’s spared me a lot of stress when something goes wrong. As it often does.

I think gender can be looked at the same way. There’s different ways to do gender, and one is about being polished and looking good while staying within societal rules. And one is about making your own damn self happy. And while people just don’t start identifying as trans unless they’re giving a lot of weight to their own happiness over fitting in, right, this is actually mostly independent of being trans vs cis, cis people also have a choice about whether they want to experience their gender primarily in terms of measuring up to societal standards or primarily in terms of pleasing themselves.

You can experience gender a la carte, based on what does and doesn’t make you happy.

For guys, this can look like: am I a sports fan kinda guy or a nerdy kind of guy or both or neither, am I a car appreciation guy or not, how much do I care about being a husband and/or father and what kind do I want to be, how much do I care about things like how I dress and how my home is arrayed, and if I do care do I prefer a fancier aesthetic or a more casual aesthetic or something else, what do I want to do about hair on my face and about hair on my head, what is my relationship to conflict and violence going to be, what is my relationship to my emotions going to be, what is my relationship to my own health going to be, what is my relationship to relationships going to be.

For gals, this can look like: maybe I like long skirts but not sexy mini skirts, maybe I like mini skirts and girlboss feminism but don’t expect me to cook, maybe I love cooking but will not smile at strangers or refuse to interrupt when everyone else is doing it, maybe I barely even know what mascara is but am more interested in forming connections with other human beings than with career success or in looking out for #1.

(And this can get really complicated when people straddle cultures, classes, even just different families with different understandings of what men and women should be like. Sometimes you have two immigrants from the same culture marry each other and one assumes they’ll live as much like they’re grandparents as possibly and one figures the best thing about not being in the old country is you don’t have to do that any more. While pretty much everyone’s got concepts of male and female, none of them entirely match up with each other.)

And it’s not an accident that a lot of feminism is about… having women and girls take on more traditionally guy roles. More on girls playing sports and women climbing the corporate ladder than boys playing with dolls and men figuring out their feelings and working on their communication skills and caring for their one children. One of these is more in tune with the life-destroying priorities of capitalism than the other, and when you try to swim across a current you get swept downstream.

I think there’s often a strong connection between what individual people need most in the depth of their souls, and what is best for people as a whole, and one of the most important tools of societal repression is alienating people from their heart’s desires.

Which means one of the most important tools of collective liberation is reconnecting with your body and your feelings and what you want most in your life.

I didn’t get at first what queer stuff had to do with the rest of it. But that’s it, isn’t it? Not everybody is gay or trans or etc, but everybody does have some way in which who they are, fundamentally, doesn’t match who they’re supposed to be, and that difference and what you do with it matters.